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Saturday, January 24, 2015

When public schools get more money, students do better

Important read.

Johnson suggested that earlier efforts
to find a a connection between school spending and results were simply
confounded by the range of factors that affect the kinds of adults that
kids become. Lawmakers send additional money to poor districts, but just
because their students don't do as well as those in affluent districts
doesn't mean that the money was wasted.

...and in fact, this money can be lifesaving. I take all of this to mean that equitable school funding does indeed matter. -Angela

Students listen to a substitute teacher, Deborah Pattin, in a temporary classroom in Olympia, Wash. (Ted S. Warren/AP)

Beginning
40 years ago, a series of court rulings forced states to
reallocate money for education, giving more to schools in poor
neighborhoods with less in the way of local resources. Critics such as
Eric Hanushek, an economist at the Hoover Institution, argued these
decisions were simply "throwing money at schools." His research found that there was little correlation between how much schools spent and how well their students performed on tests.
It's
a view still held by many politicians today, including Gov. Andrew
Cuomo (D-N.Y.). "We spend more than any other state in the country," he said a year ago. "It ain't about the money. It's about how you spend it — and the results."More recent research,
however, has found that when schools have more money, they are able
to give their students a better education. A new study on those who went
to school during the school-finance cases a few decades ago found that
those who attended districts that were affected by the rulings were more
likely to stay in school through high school and college and are making
more money today.
The authors, Kirabo Jackson and Claudia
Persico of Northwestern University and Rucker Johnson of the University
of California, Berkeley, released a revised draft
of their as-yet-unpublished paper this week. The benefits were most
obvious for students from poor families. They found that a 10 percent
increase in the money available for each low-income student resulted in a
9.5 percent increase in students' earnings as adults. A public
investment in schools, they wrote, returned 8.9 percent annually for a
typical pupil who started kindergarten in 1980.
The findings are
evidence that public schooling can be a way for children who grow up in
poverty to overcome their circumstances, Johnson argued.
"Those
increases in instructional expenditures proved to have large dividends,
significant economic returns, in the lives of these children," he said.
"We're always searching for what can break that cycle of poverty from
one generation to the next."
The study used data on incomes for 15,353 people. The oldest subjects will turn 60 this year.
"What
I like about this study is that the authors didn't shy away from
proving what many of us consider the obvious," wrote Bruce Baker, a
professor at Rutgers University and an expert on school funding, in an
email. "If you have it, you can spend it, and if you don't you can't."
As
for why his group came to a different conclusion than the one reached
by Hanushek and other skeptics, Johnson suggested that earlier efforts
to find a a connection between school spending and results were simply
confounded by the range of factors that affect the kinds of adults that
kids become. Lawmakers send additional money to poor districts, but just
because their students don't do as well as those in affluent districts
doesn't mean that the money was wasted.
The group
used the series court rulings to compare students from otherwise
similar circumstances in different places around the country, some of
whom attended schools where funding was increased, and others who did
not.
Another explanation could be that the benefits of a better
education might not become apparent for decades. Johnson said that the
difference in earnings was more pronounced for adults in their prime,
not for younger adults.
Still, the authors don't advocate simply
throwing money at the problem of education, either. "Money matters, but
it matters how it's spent," said Jackson of Northwestern.
The group found
that the increased funding had the greatest effect if it was used to
raise teachers' salaries, reduce class sizes or lengthen the school
year. That conclusion accords with other research
finding that better teachers can have profound effects on how much
students learn, since the schools with the smallest classes and the
highest salaries can attract the most talented instructors.

Max Ehrenfreund is a blogger on the Financial desk and writes for Know More and Wonkblog.